[MUSIC] When you've gone through such a traumatic event as Aaron Ralston in 127 hours, or in novelle orange, or any situation where life is at risk and you come out alive, the meaning of life takes on a new dimension. And, it is precisely this other definition of sense, sense as meaning, that we're now going to explore. So, close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Imagine that you're the one just saved from the avalanche or in any traumatic experience. And, think about how you felt. Now, open your eyes and look around you. Observe things around you in details and write in your SR journal how you feel at the moment of recovery when light is back and your eyes see the world differently. Yes, you probably experience. In those moments as I have a new sense of what matters, what it means to be alive. When I look back on my own life, and particularly that time in 2004 when I recovered from a major nine hour surgery, I remember that I awoke to a new world with a sense of urgency to connect deeply with my loved ones. What mattered to me, what mattered the most were the deep quality relationships that made life so worthwhile. I felt more than ever that I had a duty to give and deliver the best of me to help others grow. This was my sense, and it made me feel strong and ready to move forward. This is what resilience does to you. Sense, with all its definitions is or should be the ultimate leadership driver. In todays world, younger generations are increasingly looking for sense. Challenging their elders with their quest for meaning. Whether their called the Gen Z, or the generation net, or digital natives, or generation me or selfie, or even the lost generation one common observation is that their in search of balance and sense. You're probably these young adults, or at least, some of you in this MOOC are. You've grown up in an environment built on social networks. And immediate access to information. You seek the work-life balance. You are concerned about the planet. And you look for meaning in what you do. You are those multitaskers who can easily and instantly connect many different sources and sorts of data to get an answer or address a problem. Therefore, the linear and rational processes of most organizations will struggle to integrate you because you are looking for something else. And are likely to become more entrepreneurial than your parents, for example. Your apparent lack of attention and focus will match organizations which have a socially co-constructed structure, where people develop interactions that are based on knowledge sharing, reciprocity, respect, and common goals. Exactly what the Savoir Relier Protocol develops. This is another reason why sense and the several savoir approach are so valuable, interestingly though, still educated to objectify problems and break them down into small pieces or units. You tend to be masters at selecting and fragmenting information to decode it. Separating and isolating elements in order to compute them. The computer scientists do this really well. Reducing problems to the zero, one, binary mode of analysis. And it works. Scientific rigour gives us information about problems and enables us to find solutions to issues that were unsolvable. Therefore, if sense as meaning works for you, sense as a sensibility is more problematic. But the point is you need to apply all the definitions of sense to grow your leadership, and I hope this is clear to you by now. With sense as meaning your are now at six definitions of the word out of the seven given by the Webster dictionary. So do you remember what the other six definitions were? Yes, we discovered sense as the five senses. Sense as rationality. Sense as direction. Sense as common sense. Sense as consensus. Sense as sensation, as in intuition. And now sense as meaning. In my first session of leadership elective leadership beyond cultures with a group of students at the MIT Sloane school. When I told them we were going to work on sense and sensibility, they were clearly puzzled. One of them said to me, sense has meaning, yes, I get it. But our senses are not always reliable. To me they're suspect so I don't like to rely on them. He later explained to me that he was weary of dealing with things that he could not control. However, learning to draw on sense and relying more on what on our senses tell us about the world around us can increase our sense of control and leverage innate leadership capacities, as we have seen. The same student four weeks later into the course, realized how much he had progressed by using his sense of observation and his listening to enhance his understanding of how the different cultures present in his study group, Chinese, Israeli, Indian and Mexican, affected their sense making of the problems they had to address. Together, the group would have different views on how to address their case, and a solution that was obvious to one made absolutely no sense to another. The meaning and sense making exercises forced each one of them to use their perception and analytical skills together to make sense and see a proper solution that worked for all. Leadership is also about this ability to accept different meanings, different perspectives and different perceptions. To create together a shared view so that action can be taken and decisions can be made. Moving forward, we will further use the relational circuit in it's projection phase to build sense rather than just make sense as we will now see.
